UTSC researchers talked about the flow of Internet memes, the flow
of the Earth’s mantle, and the flow of scholarly information at
the first WIDEN UTSC talk, “On Flow.”

The WIDEN (Workshops for Inter-Disciplinary Exchange & Novelty)
events bring together speakers from different academic disciplines to
discuss their results. It’s part of a larger effort founded at
the St. George campus, with chapters at Ryerson, York, Massey College,
and Toronto-wide.

“We feel as the university becomes more and more siloed into
different disciplines, it becomes a proactive effort we have to make
to know what other people are doing,” says Barry Freeman,
assistant professor in theatre and performance studies, who co-founded
the series last year with Alen Hadzovic, lecturer in chemistry.
“It really fits into the ethos of UTSC in particular, which has
a long history of interdisciplinary collaboration.”

Iz Dat Fooood?

Ian Dennis Miller, a graduate student in psychology, examined how
Internet “memes” go viral. Although the “Gangnam
Style” video and the Internet-fueled Arab Spring have little
else in common, both can be viewed as self-replicating “cultural
units.”

To get insight into how memes work, Miller created the
“Memelab.” He had UTSC undergraduates come in and create
memes from words and images – for instance, a fat cat
accompanied by the caption “Oh Mah Gawd Iz Dat
Fooood?”

Then he asked creators to share the memes with friends. By tracking
how often they were downloaded, he could see how memes went viral, and
create a simulation that models how memes proliferate on a larger
scale. He hopes to improve the simulation and use it to further study
how memes work.

“Can pictures of kittens help explain political
revolutions?” he asked. “Yeah, I think actually with
simulation we really can bridge these.”

Lava Lamps

Keeley O’Farrell, a graduate student in the Department of
Physical and Environmental Sciences, talked about her work modeling
the flow of the Earth’s mantle, the part of the Earth between
the crust and the solid core, which extends down about 2,900 km.

Convection causes the mantle to flow over time, which drives the
slow movement of the Earth’s tectonic plates. Working with her
advisor Julian Lowman, associate professor of physics and
astrophysics, O’Farrell has used the Canadian SciNet High
Performance Computing consortia to run detailed simulations of the
movement of the mantle.

The simulations look a bit like the movements of a lava lamp, as
portions of the mantle rise slowly to the surface, cool, and sink. The
work promises to give us better understanding of how the inside of our
planet behaves.

Open access

Leslie Chan, senior lecturer in international studies, talked about
the flow of scholarly information. He says that despite the rise of
the Internet, scholarly journals are often too expensive for
researchers in developing countries to afford them.

One solution is the development of open access journals, such as
the Public Library of Science, which make their content available to
anyone for free over the Internet, recovering their costs through
charges to authors.

Chan himself is a founder of of Bioline International, a
collaborative platform for open access distribution of research
journals from close to twenty developing countries.

For instance, one African crop scientist researching traditional
African crops was turned down by a major international journal because
the referees considered the plants she was writing about to be weeds.
She later published in an open access journal devoted to African
crops.

Despite the disparity of subjects discussed, the researcher agreed
they faced many of the same issues, especially in figuring out
effective ways to visualize the information they work with.

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